The 1990's were a remarkable period of explosive growth of the Internet. From a specialized system used by academia, the Internet has become a widespread medium for access to information and for electronic commerce.
The Internet was developed in the 1970's with funding from the Department of Defense to interconnect university and laboratory computer systems. In the early days, Internet usage was largely confined to academic users to send e-mail, chat and access remote files and computer resources. Early Internet application programs that, for example, performed e-mail, chat and remote data access functions, did not provide an easy to use graphical user interface (GUI). The development and wide adoption of the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) fueled, in large part, the rapid growth of the Internet. HTTP is the Internet protocol used to transfer documents and other Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) type data between Systems. HTTP is the protocol on which the World Wide Web (“the web”) is based. To the Internet user, the web is an easy to use graphical user interface that provides “point-and-click” access to data from an enormous number of remote computers. Generally, the computers that provide the web content are referred to as servers and programs that allow the content to be viewed are referred to as browsers.
Internet computer communication is guided the standards of the Open System Interconnect (OSI) Model. The communication technology of the web can be explained by analogy to the OSI model for computer communication. The Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) of the web, however, divides networking functionality into only four layers, rather than OSI's seven layers: (1) a network interface layer that corresponds to the OSI link layer, (2) an Internet layer which corresponds to the OSI network layer (3) a transport layer which corresponds to the OSI transport layer and (4) an application layer which corresponds to the session, presentation and application layers of the OSI model. HTTP resides above the (TCP/IP) layers and provides a transfer protocol between the web server and the browser client. The web browser (client) may correspond to the application layer of the OSI model and Hyper-Text Markup Language may correspond to the presentation layer.
The Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML) is the software language in which most of the web is written. HTML is basically ASCII text surrounded by HTML commands in angled brackets. A web browser interprets HTML commands to determine how to display a web page.
PERL is another software language. It is a widely known and well-respected scripting language. PERL is used for a variety of tasks, such as to create the equivalent of DOS batch files or C shell scripts, but in the context of Web development PERL is used to develop CGI scripts for dynamic graphical web pages.
The web, as a whole, is made up of web page servers and web browsers that provide a GUI environment that is hardware and operating system independent. A web browser is an application program that interprets and displays HTML pages. The web is independent of hardware and operating systems because the HTTP and HTML protocols and languages that are used between the web servers and the browser client applications are the same.
HTML web pages often contain HyperText links that locate and display (point to) other HTML pages on the web. By pointing and clicking on these links, a user can skip or “surf” from page to page on the web.
A primary function of a web browser is to display the page located at a Universal Resource Location (URL) address. A URL is a unique address that includes the protocol to reference the data, the system path and data filename. The data file addressed by the URL data filename is located on a server.
HTML supports the display of data is through “frames.” A browser that supports frames has the ability to split the browser display area into separate “framed” display areas. Each display area, or frame, can contain information from a different web page and/or point to a different URL address. Frames can be created to present the user with a simultaneous coordinated presentation of multiple web pages while maintaining the look-and-feel of a single web page.
The ability to “bookmark” a page is another feature of most web browsers. Such web browsers store a plurality of bookmarked pages in a non-volatile storage medium where they may be retrieved when the browser is reactivated. A bookmark is a reference to a single URL address.
Bookmarks present a problem for web pages that are designed for display as multiple coordinated, or framed, web pages. A bookmark is a reference to a single URL address. A frame based web page, however, simultaneously displays multiple URL addressed web pages. Therefore, a bookmark created when viewing a frame based web page stores only one URL address, where multiple URL addresses are required to properly display the frame based data. When the user attempts to re-access the page with the bookmark, the browser display will only load one frame, which provides only part of the coordinated framed presentation of data.
Services such as Google®, Lexis/Nexis®, Yahoo™, Excite™, Lyco™, Infoseek™ and Hotbot™ provide a search engines for searching web pages and other information on the Internet. The engines return URL addresses of web pages and other data that satisfy the search criteria. For the most part, search engines use keyword and Boolean search strategy algorithms to find web pages and other information that satisfy the search parameters.
The present invention overcomes the limitations of bookmarks, affiliate commerce systems, frames and other strategies to deal with website egress. Other benefits of the present invention will become clear to those skilled in the art from the foregoing description.